Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was well known for tying in with the movies. The first season was deliberately oriented around Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with the Hydra reveal upending the entire story in the best possible way. Later MCU tie-ins operated on a more thematic level, with Season 4 introducing an all-new Ghost Rider alongside the theatrical release of 2016’s Doctor Strange. But one of the best tie-ins was undeniably in Season 5.
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This was one of Marvel’s best-ever time travel stories, with the S.H.I.E.L.D. team caught up in a time loop that involved the destruction of the entire planet. In the end, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. revealed the entire plot coincided with the events of Avengers: Infinity War, with a plot to defend Earth from Thanos going badly wrong. It was smart and effective, drawing Coulson and Quake in particular into the MCU’s biggest event yet, but it also caused one massive problem.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Never Dealt With Thanos’ Snap
The end of Avengers: Infinity War saw Earth’s Mightiest Heroes defeated for the first time. Thanos succeeded in his mission, snapping his fingers and erasing half the living creatures in the universe, including many of the Avengers. It was probably the biggest event in the entire history of the MCU, and many viewers assumed it was so significant a moment that the only way to fix it was to rewrite history in some way. Instead, shockingly, Marvel continued the plot in Avengers: Endgame – with a five-year time jump that kept that status quo.
As for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? The end of Season 5 may have coincided with Thanos’ snap, but there was no mention of it in Season 6. This was explicitly set a year later, with Mack rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D. as a legitimate global force. But there was no hint of a cosmic disaster on the scale of Infinity War‘s snap, either on Earth or in some side-missions in space. The show would have worked in canon if history had been rewritten and the snap was erased, but it wasn’t; the Avengers didn’t put matters right for five years. It was a mess.
Why Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Ignored Thanos’ Snap
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. never crossed over with Avengers: Endgame. Speaking to journalists back in 2019, Marvel Television’s Jeph Loeb explained there was a simple reason; Marvel Television didn’t really know what the film studio planned to do next. “We don’t want to ever do something in our show which contradicts what’s happening in the movies. The movies are the lead dog,” he admitted. Co-showrunner Jed Whedon noted that they knew “a fair amount” of Endgame‘s plot, they were wary of accidentally giving away too much if things aired out of sequence.
There’s a sad irony to it all. Had Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6 been set in a post-snap world, it would have told a much more essential MCU story – one that still hasn’t been explored today. The MCU has been remarkably hesitant to explore the consequences of the snap, with the tale only told through exposition and infodumps. Ironically, as the MCU has continued, this gap has become even more evident. It’s undermined the narrative effectiveness of the entire five-year time jump, with Marvel simply moving on rather than really discussing it.
Marvel missed a trick with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6, one that would have benefited the entire MCU. As excellent as that story was, it could have been so much more significant, had the partnership between Marvel Studios and Marvel Television (and the ABC network, who decided scheduling of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) been a bit more well-thought-through. Seven years on, it’s still one of Marvel’s worst missed opportunities.
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